PROFILE : Running Start : A product to replace nail polish in the snagged-stocking repair kit launches Tracie Cessna to entrepreneurship.

There it was again, Tracie Cessna thought. Dread. It accompanied her into every grocery or drug store.

Thigh-deep in the prolonged, alternately comical and painful process of marketing a product she had invented, her stomach churned as she stalked the aisles. She knew that, if somebody beat her to the racks with a revolutionary, amazing fluid guaranteed to halt runs in hosiery . . . well, she just gave a sigh of relief every time it was nowhere to be found.

Fear and loathing, Cessna discovered, might not be the mother of invention, but they’re definitely part of the family.

“I fully admit I’ve had anxious thoughts through the whole ordeal. I have all these friends having children and buying homes. This is my baby,” said 30-year-old Cessna, holding a bottle of Runaway, the product that propelled her onto the path of entrepreneurship.

Her distress has given way to the headiness of success. Now that Runaway adorns racks at major supermarkets and department stores, now that women nationwide can be free of the time-honored but disgusting method of killing hosiery runs with thick gobs of pink nail polish, now that the business is in the black with no looking back, the “ordeal” sounds more like Tracie’s Excellent Adventure.

Like many creative ideas, Runaway emerged from a moment of panic. In 1986, Cessna, a Thousand Oaks resident and former software company manager, was late for a meeting when her stocking sprang a run. Frantic, she dashed around the office, begging co-workers for nail polish. A receptionist dug into her purse for an old bottle of hardened polish.

“I vividly remember thinking, ‘There’s got to be a better way,’ ” Cessna said.

That evening, she ran the idea past her brothers, Mike Reinhart and Dave Cessna. They yawned.

“I couldn’t perceive a real need for it,” said Reinhart, an attorney and family realist. “It didn’t hit me as something marketable.”

Dave Cessna took a diplomatic but chauvinistic view, telling his sister, “It’s hard for a man to agree that this is a wonderful idea.”

The guys eventually got the message, however. Reinhart asked his wife about the idea, then his secretary. He was astounded.

“Sure enough, women glop huge amounts of nail polish on their stockings,” he said.

Thus, Cessna Creations was born. The feisty, upbeat Tracie Cessna is the company’s undisputed driving force, but Reinhart and Dave Cessna put in a lot of time. Runaway is the glue that keeps this family together.

There have been times, though, that all three have nearly come unglued.

“I had no clue what I was getting into at the beginning,” Tracie Cessna said. “I thought, ‘I’m going to invent a product, make money, it’s going to be wonderful.’ ”

Instead, the intrepid entrepreneurs burst into a baffling world full of plastic-eating potions, brush-tip dabbers and rack jobbers.

Kitchen chemistry was the first step in product development. Tracie Cessna isolated the ingredient in nail polish that stops runs: toluenesulfonamide/formalin resin.

An unwieldy term, to be sure, but the key to a user-friendly product.

“I had to find out everything there was to know about plastics,” she said. “I didn’t want to invent something that burned a hole in people’s legs.”

Or the container. She filled a conventional glue stick with her concoction and “before my eyes it disintegrated,” she said. “I said, ‘OK, this isn’t going to be that easy.’ ”

Once an appropriate plastic was identified, a device to apply the fluid had to be found. At a plastics trade convention in 1986, Tracie Cessna and Reinhart were told that only a Dab-o-Matic would do.

“I thought, ‘A Dab-o-Matic? What kind of people are we dealing with?,’ ” Tracie Cessna said.

The Dab-o-Matic, a tiny bottle cap with a swab-sized sponge attached to its underside, turned out to be dandy.

“That was one of the key finds,” Reinhart said. “It probably made the product viable.”

Assembly was next. There sat the three college graduates on several Saturdays in 1988, tediously filling 25,000 bottles of Runaway. Not to say that no thinking was involved. In fact, their inventiveness knew no bounds.

* A defective shotgun-shell loader was used to press the Dab-o-Matic tips snugly into the plastic containers.

* An iron was used to heat-seal the container to cardboard backing.

* The legs of Tracie Cessna’s best friend, Tina Kiffe, were used to demonstrate the product in a photograph on the package.

Samples were shipped out in December, 1988. A sales pitch was developed, touting the superiority of Runaway over nail polish. (Cessna claims it doesn’t stick because it’s thinner than nail polish; the sponge tip is neater than a nail-polish brush; and it dries quickly and is clear on any color nylon.)

Meanwhile, Tracie Cessna hunkered down with her inventory--all 25,000 bottles were kept in her Thousand Oaks residence.

Getting Runaway into stores was a chore. Cessna was flying against the major carriers.

“The whole system is set up against a Tracie Cessna going in with a great product idea,” she said. “The big chains work with Procter & Gamble and don’t know me from Adam.

“Some stores would say, ‘You’re too small. I don’t want to deal with you.’ My response was to shake my fist and say, ‘Someday you’ll be coming to me on your knees.’ ”

Finally, the first order arrived in the mail. Henshey’s, a department store in Santa Monica, wanted some Runaway.

Tracie Cessna ran in the house screaming, “Oh my god, we have a purchase order!”

Replied Reinhart evenly: “And we have a product.”

Runaway found its way onto the racks of Vons and Alpha Beta through a middleman called a rack jobber--a distributor who combines several small products, rents a rack in a store and stocks them.

Runaway was soon on its way to runaway profits. The 25,000 units were sold in 1989, and 75,000 were sold in 1990. Tracie Cessna was able to quit her job with the software company in June to devote her time to her company. And more.

Brainstorming has become a frequent activity around Cessna Creations. New products are in the works. But none, Tracie Cessna said, will be quite the same as Runaway.

“I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I’m glad I did it,” she said. “I used to think that other people are the experts and they can do things better. Now, I know different.

“My career, I hope, will be a succession of creations.”

UP CLOSETRACIE CESSNA

Resident of: Thousand Oaks

Job: Entrepreneur

Perspective: “Some stores would say, ‘You’re too small. I don’t want to deal with you.’ My response was to shake my fist and say, ‘Someday you’ll be coming to me on your knees.’ ”